I sure wouldn't buy a new MacBook to run Linux. But, I might switch this one to Linux if/when it can't handle a new OS X release.

Seriously.

When health insurance and health care are sold as a for-profit products, it is inevitable that some people will go without insurance and/or care. Why? Because they can't pay enough to make it profitable to sell to them. The market is fine and all, but it can't survive without profit.

Your best bet now is to look very hard for some form of group insurance. The older you are, the greater the probability you will succumb to somthing that requires surgery and/or long-term treatment/rehabilitation. i.e., things that generate 6-figure bills. (Think about things happening that cost $500,000 to deal with. Think about pills that cost $100 a pop.) Better to have good coverage for that eventuality and poor coverage of things like routine doctor visits than vice-versa.

Well, I did say disappearing is very, very difficult.

The post was a tinge sarcastic, We leave so many traces of ourselves behind that actually disappearing and not being found would be almost impossible for anyone who had not been planning it for some time, if a serious and sustained effort was made to find them. To do it on the spur of the moment, with our credit and online histories intact and pointing to us, seems almost impossible to me. You wouldn't be disappearing so much as hiding.

As for the money, well, if you don't have cash, then you have to use credit, which means you send up a red flare. Using credit means getting found. Cash can be used for illegal bribes or legal bribes. Any number of countries will give you residence status on payment of a substantial fee. The illegal bribing part could be useful in acquiring a passport under a new name from your new country.

And, yes, you're right about the risks of holding all that cash.

Computer savvy or not, you almost certainly would not be able to erase all traces of you on the net, in any amount of time.

So, your focus ought to be on keeping people from locating you, the physical being.

So, change your appearance, dramatically. Shave the head. Shave the beard. Wear lifts in the shoes. Color the hair. Wear a dress. Or a suit. Or a keffiyeh. Slouch. Or straighten up.

Don't use credit. If you're lucky, you had $500,000 or so in cash and a box of diamonds on hand before you decided to vanish. If not, find an untraceable way to get it.

Go somewhere awful with miserable infrastructure and officials who can be bribed. Bribe them. Continue to bribe them. Hope no one bribes them more to turn you over.

Disappearing is very, very difficult.

If you want to "support" something, buy it.

It's a market, not a cooperative or a charity or a football team. If you buy something, that's all the support they want.

If you don't buy the thing, black ads or don't block ads, as you wish. It is not an issue of ethics.

Don't be silly. Random DNS records? Sure.

For months, the FBI has been, essentially, providing DNS service for lots of people who didn't even know their machine had been compromised. This is the FBI, remember. If the FBI announced it was going to muck around with the DNS of millions of people, the Usual Suspects here would be ranting about the Evil Of It All.

Most of those 300,000 remaining victims will likely never fix anything. They're only been on the internet for these last several months thanks to the FBI, and they don't even know it.

Pull the plug and go catch some crooks.

All languages are exercises in abstraction, some more than others. That's the very nature of a computer language. They all exist to translate human intentions into something that can run a very, very, very complicated machine.

C is less of an abstraction than some other languages. That does not mean it is old fashioned or outdated.

Arguments that C is unsafe or dangerous miss the point. It isn't the language that is not safe. It's the programmer. If a programmer writes unsafe code in C, that programmer does not know his or her craft well enough.

If C was unsafe, Unix would not exist.

Just how do you intend to collect that price? Users -- the general public -- don't owe developers a damn thing. If you want users who know something, find them. Hence, my point.

I don't think the general public can distinguish between "stable" or "experimental" or "beta". From the point of view of most of them, if they can get it, it's ready.

There's nothing about free software that says developers need to expose every thing they do to random strangers. If they do, they ought to expect a great deal of misunderstanding and complaining because expectations that users are "educated" about software development are sure to be disabused.

Note that I am not, and haven't, suggested locking up development. I am, though, saying that testing ought to be in a controlled environment until the thing stands a better than even chance of not breaking. Sure, release early and often, yada, yada, yada. But, no one is keeping score on Obedience to Unexamined Truths, so don't release crap you know doesn't work just in the hopes that strangers will take the time to detail the specifics for you. If you do release crap, be prepared to take the repetitional hit.

No, it doesn't. Nothing is stopping KDE, or any other effort, from establishing a group, or groups, of testers and organizing a coherent, disciplined approach to testing. The source is open, yes. But, there is no requirement to put the source on public servers if you don't want it there.

  In my experience, software testing is better done when you know the skills and backgrounds of the people doing the testing and can ask/direct them to test specific areas. E.g., if you already know X causes Y, you don't need people telling you Y is broken. You'd rather have competent testers exercising X.

Keep it "in house" until you have something good enough to be labeled a beta, in the legitimate sense that it used to mean.

Get your feedback and testing from a closed group.

I'm even reluctant to suggest releasing a beta, since so many people today seem ignorant of the purpose of a beta. Every time someone releases one people start to complain that it's "broken".

The solution to releasing software that isn't ready for people to use is not to release it.

I suspect the ability for users to disable secure boot makes a legal challenge to this moot. At best, MS might be compelled to make secure boot opt in. I.e., compel users to enter firmware to enable it.

And I expect it to be a sales boon for Apple. People annoyed by this will go to the mall and buy Apple. They won't go home and try to install Linux.

No. Motherboard makers face the same requirement. And, as I understand it, this requirement does not apply to server hardware.

Whatever you think of MS and Red Hat, this is a problem tht every Linux distribution needs to address. Rhetoric about freedom and urging lawsuits won't change anything.

  Users will be able to go into firmware and disable secure boot, but I don't think many will do that just to try Linux. They are much more likely to just go buy a Mac. Especially if there are initial problems when this is rolled out.

Folks who dual boot Linux and Windows could be really screwed because an unsigned bootloader will be seen by Windows as malware, with an MS update eventually coming down to disable it.